I am up early on my last night in Madison, for now – and Priya Kale sent this with a one line note, “You will appreciate this.” It is a conversation with Osho on the subject of marriage and children. Incidentally, Priya grew up near Pune, where the original Osho ashram was. Here, we get a glimpse of why he was such a controversial figure.

This article has been updated at this link.

The swine flu story emerged in the US around the time of the Taurus New Moon, so that can serve as a working chart for the current event. This is an Aries Point chart, with Venus and Mars there, square Pluto in early Capricorn. Feel the whole thing for a moment — doesn’t it have that sense about it? That sense of personal (Venus and Mars) imminence (Pluto and the Aries Point)?

The issue first was acknowledged March 18, with the Sun at the very end of Pisces — also qualifying as an Aries Point event. The Aries Point indicates precisely the kind of development that is public or widespread in nature but which comes with the feeling of having personal implications. But that does not make the story true, or suggest the actual extent of the impact. Many Aries Point stories manifest as big news events with little actual public impact, but arriving with a lot of private fear. The fear is often the point of contact with the ‘news’ event.

Events currently (including news reports) are unfolding as Mercury moves into shadow phase (this began Thursday). Mercury is currently applying to a square Neptune. Both are red flags that we are in an environment susceptible to false information. This Mercury retrograde process will come with three squares between Mercury and Neptune, so it’s a process of sorting out deception.

That would also suggest that we are susceptible to fear — or to diversion. So we might want to ask what we are being diverted from. The suicide of Robert Kellermann last week, the CFO of Freddie Mac, is a clue. I think we are about to see another round of bank failures as the Sun passes the Beltane point. Remember two things: the Beltane point, being exactly 45 degrees from the Aries Point, is an Aries Point trigger; and second, we saw how that might work with last year’s New Moon exactly on Beltane pointing to the 2008 round of bank failures.

Notably, this is surfacing with Chiron conjunct Neptune in the background. This seems a perfect backdrop for this kind of issue. With Jupiter approaching, the story is likely to get bigger before it gets smaller. We are likely to have a dose of ‘what a strange world we live in where so much can go wrong’ kind of thinking. Chiron can be associated with both disease process and with healing process; Neptune is associated with things of an obscure origin, with misdiagnosis and with misunderstanding.

As we can see from the homeopathic literature, influenza is directly associated with anxiety and fear, and in particular, the last major pandemic was treated with a remedy linked to anticipation anxiety. At the moment we are living in a world of that kind of fear, particularly economic in nature. We’re constantly on the brink of ‘what’s gonna happen next?’

We need to watch this psychic theme more carefully than we need to be concerned about actual influenza.

This was written for Parallel Worlds, the 2006 annual edition of Planet Waves. I believe and thought at the time that the “bird flu” issue was a scare tactic to distract us from the crimes of the Bush administration and to jack up the price of Don Rumsfeld’s stock in Tamiflu. However, I talked to enough public health officials who were concerned, Ward Stone among them, that I thought the issue was worth taking seriously.

Medicine depot in Cathedral Square, in the city of Christchurch, New Zealand, where the Government standard influenza medicine was supplied. This was truly a worldwide pandemic, reaching every corner of the globe. Image courtesy of Christchurch City Libraries.

If you want to know why public health officials are so concerned about the possibility of an Avian Influenza outbreak, just learn a little about the 1918-1919 worldwide flu pandemic, called the Spanish Flu. But as you do, notice your fear level and your other responses.

By one estimate, 5 percent of the world population was lost to this disease, which had the power to kill people from within six hours of the first onset of symptoms. Nearly one in five people suffered from the disease worldwide to some extent, according to Wikipedia (link below). In the United States, some 28 percent of the population suffered from Spanish Flu, and more than 500,000 died from it. There were reports of people falling off their horses dead, or dying walking down the street.

And it was a disease over which the traditional medical profession had no power whatsoever. But homeopathy, a branch of medicine founded by Samuel Hahnemann in the late 18th century, had close to complete success dealing with this disease. Homeopathy is uniquely suited to handle large outbreaks of virulent diseases in the population, both preventively, and on a wide scale once an outbreak has occurred.

Continued in Parallel Worlds.

Note: Here is Kirsti Melto’s article on the Taurus New Moon at her Planet Waves blog called Sphinx.

Friends, Readers, 6D Eronauts:

Yesterday I got lost in the Memorial Student Union at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. This was five minutes after I had photographed a kid giving an old-fashioned Midwestern hellfire and brimstone sermon to students eating lunch on the student union’s terrace. Appropriately enough, I ended up wandering into the campus LGBT Center, where I camped out for a few minutes to rearrange the lenses and picture cards on my cameras. We had an interesting conversation there. I got some giggles when I proposed that they add an M onto the end of LGBT, and I left a stack of Book of Blue postcards on the literature table and was given a handful of awesome sexpositive buttons. (Wearing buttons is not enough.)

Still photo from Tristan Taormino's "Expert Guide to Anal Sex," designed for women. She directs and occasionally acts in her own film projects.

Then I found out that Tristan Taormino would be speaking as part of some kind of awareness week festivities here, sponsored by the student organization Sex Out Loud.

Tristan, creator of Pucker Up magazine, is something of a self-publishing genius. She then wrote the Anal Adviser column in the Village Voice for nine years. Her first book, a guide to anal sex for women, was made into a film, then she found her calling as a director.

She does the kind of books and videos that make you want to try what she’s teaching you about. In other words, she is the quintessential sexpositive feminist, who has dispensed with political correctness and is doing the work of the Goddess on the planet. I was already spending the day with the hottest date in the city, who was happy to go. I called my friend Jeff Patterson, a medical professor at UW who is a scholar and presenter on the history of sexuality, and said you have to see this woman speak.

We arrived in the lecture hall, in the riot-proof Humanities Building. I needed to get permission to tape the presentation and take photos, so I was presented to Ms. Taormino to get that consent, where I had one of the honors of my career. I introduced myself, hoping she remembered an email I wrote to her in 2001, and she said: “Oh, that’s funny, just yesterday I was reading my Planet Waves Taurus horoscope…”

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Greetings…I will be updating with a New Moon piece, but it will most likely be late Friday or early Saturday.

The following is from Planet Waves Astrology News, our subscriber edition published each Friday morning.

Dear Friend and Reader:

In my Planet Waves daily diary all week I’ve been commenting about the conjunction of Chiron and Neptune that is now within one degree, in late Aquarius. This is a ‘near-miss’ rather than an exact conjunction but it’s coming in at a nice strength. Neptune in Aquarius, which began in 1998 around when Bill Clinton was impeached, has been the perfect fodder for our whole “lie to me / why deal with it?” mentality that has been such fruitful soil for the Karl Roves and Dick Cheneys of the world to plant their fleurs de mal.

Rose window at Notre Dame Cathedral, Paris. I am not certain the orientation, but I believe this is the rose window facing northeasterly. Photo by Eric Francis.

When Chiron arrived in 2005, I was certain that there would be a gradual public awakening that would peak as Chiron made its exact conjunction to Neptune. The current one is a near miss, which is at its closest on May 31, to within one-quarter of a degree. Chiron will go retrograde before the conjunction perfects, and the exact meeting will take place Feb. 17, 2010. Of note, this is shortly after the one and only contact of Saturn in Libra square Pluto in Capricorn that occurs in late 2009. The two events are connected.

Finally, there is one last near miss of Chiron and Neptune, also within one-quarter of a degree, on Nov. 3, 2010. (Tracy Delaney in Wales programmed the ephemeris where I am getting this information.)

For the current near-miss, Jupiter is there, so the last week of May we have a very close triple conjunction of Jupiter, Chiron and Neptune. This puts the two rulers of Pisces in a conjunction (Jupiter to Neptune, which happens about every 14 years). The prior cycle of Neptune to Chiron conjunctions was in 1879-1880, in Taurus. The next cycle starts in 2094, in Virgo. This is a once-in-a-lifetime event, and therefore it is astrology that will also define an era of history and mark the astrology of a sub-generation.

Usually we don’t notice these events until it’s over. However, as the Internet has begun to make information available to those who seek it, we can now work with transits like this while they are happening, and co-create their ‘meaning’ and explore their creative potential together.

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In a follow-up to my mention this morning of the 21 horses that died, someone has taken responsibility. According to KTLA-TV in Los Angeles, the horses were became sick after taking an improperly prepared vitamin compound. Here is the lead of the story. I am very happy to learn that it wasn’t any kind of government equine virus jar that came open, though it would be nice if those bottles turned up.

PALM BEACH, FL. — An Ocala pharmacy has taken responsibility for botching a vitamin compound given to the horses just hours before they died.

“The strength of an ingredient in the medication was incorrect,” Jennifer Beckett, Chief Operations Officer Franck’s Pharmacy, told reporters outside the pharmacy today.

“We will cooperate fully with the authorities as they continue their investigation.”

She declined to answer further questions, but said, “We extend our most sincere condolences to the horses owners, the Lechuza polo team and the members of the United States Polo Association. We share their grief and sadness.”